The Slansky Quiz: “Arithmetic!”

a) The Massachusetts governor who urged Democrats “to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe.”

b) The New Hampshire candidate for sheriff who refused to rule out the use of deadly force to prevent abortions—though he “would hope that it wouldn’t come to that”—because, he cryptically explained, “There is a difference between legal and lawful.”

c) The San Diego pastor who warned that if President Obama is reëlected, “We have sixty-one days of America left. If we do not turn at this point, America as we have known her will be forever gone.”

d) The radio talk-show host who announced his personal boycott of American Airlines because, he claimed, his flight attendant “merely barked the word ‘breakfast’ when he came to me. When others were politely asked if they cared for anything to eat and given the choices, I was just barked at. When he delivered a soda, he slammed it down so hard, I hesitated to even open the can for fear that it would spray all over other passengers in the cabin. By the way, the other passengers, nobody else had to open their can. He opened it and poured it for them.”

2) True or false? Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz acknowledged to CNN that the original omission from the platform of language identifying Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—and the very public objections to the changing back of said language—was “the last thing we needed, a P.R. disaster.”

a) True. She added, “And why did we leave out a single mention of the word ‘God’? Would it have killed us to slip it in somewhere, just once or twice, rather than give Republicans the opportunity to clobber us as God-haters for the next two months?”

b) False. Although the re-insertion of “Jerusalem” and “God” resulted in a series of voice votes in which the increasingly vociferous opposition was ultimately deemed by the befuddled convention chairman Antonio Villaraigosa to have constituted approval—which then led to loud booing—Schultz dismissed the whole thing as “essentially a technical oversight” and said “there wasn’t any discord” surrounding the vote, which she said was “absolutely two-thirds” in favor of the change, prompting Anderson Cooper to observe that she seemed to be living in “an alternate universe.”

**Who tweeted what?

“Bill Clinton just impregnated Sandra Fluke backstage…”

“First night of the Vagina Monologues in Charlotte going as expected.”

“The President said nothing in his speech tonight. But he said it so much better than Mitt Romney when he said nothing in Tampa.”

“World’s oceans very excited tonight, If Romney elected they will take over the earth.”

a) Erick Erickson

b) Albert Brooks

c) Joe Scarborough

d) Ann Coulter

7) What did Michelle Obama not say during her speech to the convention?

a) “Being President doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are”

b) “[Barack] picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.”

c) “We learned about dignity and decency—that how hard you work matters more than how much you make, that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity—that the truth matters, that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules, and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square. We learned about gratitude and humility … and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.”

d) “I love women!”

8) Complete Bill Maher’s quote about the Tea Party: “The one thing they hate is being called racist. The other thing they hate is _______”

a) taxes.

b) black people.

c) everything.

d) when people point out that they obtusely named themselves after a gay sex act.

9) Who is Amy Kremer?

a) The Brooklyn congresswoman who told Stephen Colbert that she was “pretty sure” there was still slavery in her borough in 1898.

b) The Republican National Committee staffer who appears in an ad called “The Breakup,” in which she pretends to be a frustrated former Obama supporter.

c) The women’s-rights activist who pointed out that for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes seventy-seven cents, adding, “Maybe twenty-three cents doesn’t sound like a lot to someone with a Swiss bank account, Cayman Island Investments and an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars.”

d) The Tea Party leader who declared on CNN that President Obama is “more about a global … being a global … oh, what’s the word? Being more one world, global, with, you know, other countries, and it’s not about the shining city on the hill, the greatness that has always been America that our Founding Fathers were about…. I don’t believe that he loves America the way that we do, he’s more about one world!”

a) Former Ohio governor Ted Strickland’s “Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps.”

b) Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s “No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don’t run this country for corporations. We run it for people.”

c) Massachusetts senator John Kerry’s “After more than ten years without justice for thousands of Americans murdered on 9/11, after Mitt Romney said it would be ‘naïve’ to go into Pakistan to pursue the terrorists, it took President Obama, against the advice of many, to give that order and finally rid this earth of Osama bin Laden. Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off now than he was four years ago.”

d) President Obama’s “You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally.”

11) Who is Roscoe Bartlett?

a) The televangelist who said Democrats are “the party of gays, godlessness, and whatever else.”

b) The Republican congressman from Maryland who said federally funded student loans are “unconstitutional” and seemed to warn—albeit incomprehensibly—that they could lead to another “Holocaust.”

c) The young Charlotte resident who was arrested by the Secret Service after tweeting, “Ima Assassinate president Obama this evening!”

d) The elderly New York delegate who told an ABC News reporter on camera, “If I see [Romney], I would like to kill him.”

12) Three of these lines were spoken by Bill Clinton in his convention speech. Which three were not in the speech?

a) “Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.”

b) “The Republican argument against the President’s reëlection was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy. It went something like this: We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough. So fire him and put us back in.”

c) “Remember that Paul Simon album, ‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’? Well, after Paul Ryan’s claim about running an under-three-hours marathon, I think we should put out an album of his greatest hits called, ‘There Goes Lyin’ Ryan.’”

d) “We simply cannot afford to give the reins of government to someone who will double down on trickle down.”

e) “The saddest thing about the Republicans is that for all their talk about how much they love God and love their country, the only thing they really seem to love is hate.”

f) “You know, with some of the things I’ve been hearing from the other side, I’m starting to think crazy is the new sane.”